Publisher: Search Engine Watch Blog

If you remember the early days of social media marketing, then youÃ¢â¬â¢ll also remember all those talks where youÃ¢â¬â¢d be told that if you could just harness 1% of FacebookÃ¢â¬â¢s total audience, youÃ¢â¬â¢d have a huge number of potential customers. In the end, it didnÃ¢â¬â¢t quite work out like that, but as user numbers have grown, youÃ¢â¬â¢d think that the law of averages would provide you with some new followers along the way.

LetÃ¢â¬â¢s get to the crux of the matter. It never fails to make me smile when people misuse the term Ã¢â¬Ësemantic searchÃ¢â¬â¢, so reallyÃ¢â¬Â¦ what is semantic web search? A simple definition of semantic search We often talk of semantic search as if itÃ¢â¬â¢s something new. Semantic search goes back years, even centuries. Here is a simple definition of semantic searchÃ¢â¬Â¦ LetÃ¢â¬â¢s take a village. Mark and Claire have a seven year old son, James,

WeÃ¢â¬â¢ve already heard that RankBrain , GoogleÃ¢â¬â¢s artificial intelligence system, is the Ã¢â¬Åthird most important signal contributing to the result of a search queryÃ¢â¬Â and it seems like we may have confirmation on the top two factors as well. During a live Q&A from WebPromo with Andrey Lipattsev, the Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google Ireland, SEO expert Ammon Johns suggested to Lipattsev that, knowing what we know about RankBrain,

There has been a lot of talk in the recent past about the Ã¢â¬Ëdemise of TwitterÃ¢â¬â¢ . Will the platform continue in the future, or will it slide slowly into irrelevancy? ItÃ¢â¬â¢s a complicated question, but not one without precedent. One only has to look at the fortunes of MySpace to realise that no social platform is too big to fail. I have always believed one of the key issues is that new users find Twitter confusing.

I have a difficult task. In order to promote our upcoming two-day digital marketing event called Shift , taking place in London on 24 Ã¢â¬" 25 May, I have to define what it means to be a digital leader. Why Ã¢â¬ËdifficultÃ¢â¬â¢? Well if youÃ¢â¬â¢ve noticed our own editorial shift over the past 6 months on SEW and ClickZ, then youÃ¢â¬â¢ll be aware what a dislike weÃ¢â¬â¢ve taken towards buzzwords . ItÃ¢â¬â¢s the digital marketing industry,

If you havenÃ¢â¬â¢t noticed by now, Google Shopping is taking center-stage for retailers as we move deeper into 2016 Ã¢â¬" with more traffic, more tests and more features. You certainly wouldnÃ¢â¬â¢t have missed Google removing text ads on the right-hand rail of their search engine results pages, leaving the space wide-open for even more product listing ads (PLAs). With this update,

Visual content in all its forms has become the driving trend online, as improvements in technology and bandwidth push the boundaries of what can be done with visual media. Nowhere is this more true than in social media, where having a good visual strategy can be key to taking advantage of marketing and promotional opportunities. In recent years,

A couple of years ago I created the Periodic Table of Content Marketing, to help people create the right kind of content for their brands. That visualisation was very much tactical, in terms of its scope. I wanted to combine a brainstorming tool with a checklist, to help with the content creation process. My Periodic Table of Content Marketing is proving ridiculously popular. Meta! http://t.co/xKnMAnCeBd pic.twitter.com/yjtAvzvtFK Ã¢â¬" Chris Lake (@lakey) March 19,

Earlier this month came the launch of a brand new search engine dedicated to providing in-depth insights into the business world. Its name? Plonked. In the world of search, even dominated as it is by giants like Google and Bing, thereÃ¢â¬â¢s still room for a small organisation to do something new, and do it well. Enter Plonked , a niche search engine focused on providing information about businesses. Plonked was co-founded by Ankur Varma and Josh Atir,

The importance of headlines should never be overlooked, a little time spent finding the right headline can make a lot of difference. A good headline means more people will click on your article wherever they see it, it ensures that the effort you spent in writing an article doesnÃ¢â¬â¢t go to waste, and it can also help your content to be picked up by search engines in the weeks and months after publishing. Here are a few areas to think about when writing headlines.

Imagine a world where Heath Robinson style contraptions genuinely exist and even the most complicated tasks can be achieved without you even having to get out of bed, or even be awake. Blissful huh? Well weÃ¢â¬â¢re not far off that in digital terms, thanks to IFTTT, a tool that can help you automate thousands of time consuming tasks,

The way 30 trillion web pages are ranked changed forever on October 26, 2015. ThatÃ¢â¬â¢s when the world became aware of RankBrain , GoogleÃ¢â¬â¢s machine-learning artificial intelligence system. Google calls RankBrain, when itÃ¢â¬â¢s in use, Ã¢â¬Åthe third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query.

The web is becoming more and more visual , and nowhere more so than on social media, where some of the most influential platforms revolve around pictures and video. Social networks which were previously text-centric have made a point of integrating more flexible and better-quality options for embedding media, and the last few years have seen the astronomic rise of several key platforms which revolve entirely around visual media .

Last week artificial intelligence achieved another victory over humankind. Google DeepMindÃ¢â¬â¢s AlphaGo program won 4-1 against Lee Sedol, one of the best Go players in the world, in a milestone that experts thought was a decade away. Of course, AI is about much more than winning board games. GoogleÃ¢â¬â¢s RankBrain AI powers its Knowledge Graph search results, bringing context and semantics to the traditional keyword-based search.

If youÃ¢â¬â¢re anything like me then Reddit is a fantastic place to hang out, particularly when youÃ¢â¬â¢ve got a little time to spare. The depth and breadth of user-driven content on Reddit is incredible. If youÃ¢â¬â¢ve written it off as a repository of cat pictures then it might be worth re-evaluating (IÃ¢â¬â¢m allergic to cats, and most cat pictures). ItÃ¢â¬â¢s weird but a lot of people seem to be a bit scared of Reddit.

Ã¢â¬ÅThe graphic method has considerable superiority for the exposition of statistical facts over the tabular. A heavy bank of figures is grievously wearisome to the eye, and the popular mind is as incapable of drawing any useful lessons from it as of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers.Ã¢â¬Â -Arthur Briggs Farquhar and Henry Farquhar from Economic and Industrial Delusions In a previous column ,

If you have a mobile-friendly website, stand down. This news is not for you. If you donÃ¢â¬â¢t have a mobile-friendly website, my goodness what the hell are you doing!?? Have you not had enough warnings already? Stop reading this right now and go get a responsive website immediately you maniac! So for anyone else reading this news Ã¢â¬" probably one person: my boss, the editor-in-chief of ClickZ (hi Graham!

A hybrid mobile app is an application that has been built with web technologies Ã¢â¬" HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript Ã¢â¬" and then Ã¢â¬ÅwrappedÃ¢â¬Â with native code for closer integration with the device and/or to pass itself off as a download app. The hybrid app sits in the middle of the political battle between aficionados of the web/browser-based app and the native app. Depending on your viewpoint,

So youÃ¢â¬â¢ve realized, for one reason or another, that itÃ¢â¬â¢s time to crank up the volume of your business and invest in digital marketing. YouÃ¢â¬â¢ll be faced with an immediate question: there are so many different channels in digital marketing, which one do you try first? Well, the first step is knowing what each channel does, then we can narrow down your options with some recommendations.

*dusts hands, congratulates self on sensationalist headline, sits back and awaits traffic* So yeah, you probably already know this, but if you donÃ¢â¬â¢t Ã¢â¬" last night Instagram announced that will be adopting an algorithm that will show posts from the people you interact with/care about the most at the top of your news feed. This is what we in the business call Ã¢â¬Ëdoing a FacebookÃ¢â¬â¢. Instagram states that people miss on average 70% of their feeds (crikey,